Later he attended the Universities of Florida and Cincinnati in pursuit of a career in medicine, but his determination to fly was greater than that of a career both parents wanted for him. His teen years were spent attending Western Military Academy. From that day on, Paul knew he had to fly. As part of an advertising stunt, he threw Baby Ruth candy bars, with paper parachutes attached, from a biplane flying over a crowd gathered at the Hialeah horse track near Miami. Later his parents moved to Florida where, at the age of twelve, Paul had his first airplane ride. was born in Quincy, Illinois on February 23rd, 1915. There are no Marquess of Queensberry rules in war. “You’ve got to take stock and assess the situation at that time. “I’m not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I’m proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did,” he said in a 1975 interview. It was, he said, his patriotic duty-the right thing to do. Tibbets, then a 30-year-old colonel, never expressed regret over his role. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible.” We knew it was going to kill people right and left. “We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. 6, 2005, the 60th anniversary of the bomb. “I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing,” Tibbets told The Columbus Dispatch for a story on Aug. The Japanese surrendered a few days later, ending the war. Three days later, the United States dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, killing an estimated 40,000 people. The blast killed 70,000 to 100,000 people and injured countless others. 6, 1945, when the plane and its crew of 14 dropped the five-ton “Little Boy” bomb over Hiroshima. “It’s an end of an era,” said Newhouse, who served as Tibbets’ manager for a decade. It was the first time man had used nuclear weaponry against his fellow man. Tibbets’ historic mission in the plane Enola Gay, named for his mother, marked the beginning of the end of World War II. Tibbets had requested no funeral and no headstone, fearing it would provide his detractors with a place to protest, Newhouse said. Tibbets died at his Columbus home after a two month decline from a variety of health problems, said Gerry Newhouse, a longtime friend. Paul Tibbets, the pilot and commander of the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, died Thursday in Columbus Ohio, a spokesman said.
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Paul Tibbets, WWII commander of infamous B-29, requested no headstone